ECHOES. 
439 
of a deserted home called me back to firesides with 
blazing back-logs, and family circlings, and hallow- 
eves, and childish laughter, and all the rest : a whole 
year's mean temperature of six degrees (5° 92^) above 
zero makes the flesh tingle for a hearth-stone. 
Some of the bergs were worn in deep, vault-like 
chasms, through which a way was practicable to 
broader caverns within. In these crystal solitudes 
the echoes were startling. A whistle, your own whis- 
tle — you could hardly recognize it for the length and 
clearness of the ring ; the clang of a ramrod was heard 
running down the ranks of a whole army in review; 
and when you spoke, your words were repeated through 
the motionless and elastic atmosphere in syllables al- 
most as long as your breath would hold out to make 
them. I tried a hexameter we used to quote at home, 
and it came back to me, in slow and distinct utter- 
ance, word for word. There is a certain cousin of 
mine, whom I remember envying in our school-boy 
days, for the dispatch with which he could say his 
prayers of a frosty night before jumping into bed. He 
may think, when he reads these pages, how odd it 
would have been to hear his devotional effort repeated 
at length by such a chorus of echoes in succession. 
I have spoken of the rich lazulite blue that was re- 
flected from the bergs. It combined curiously some- 
times with the atmospheric tints. About two o'clock 
in the afternoon the sun shone out above a bank of 
mist with that metallic, yellow light which we some- 
times see when it clears up of an evening after falling 
weather. Striking on a berg that we had just been 
remarking for the purity and depth of its colorj it was 
reflected over us in a flood of unearthly green, that 
opaque, abominable green that the scene-painters are 
